Lets talk about Text

I …….. YOU
……… IS BEAUTIFUL
STAIRWAY TO ……….

LOVE,LIFE,HEAVEN.Are these the words you fit into the blanks?Did you do so because they were there in some subconscious part of your mind or because they were the best fit?Can you read a paragraph,a page,a book,a treatise with half the words missing and fill them in?Chances are you can.How?
It is due to the built in redundancy in the English language.Redundancy in the structure wherein you know that there are certain rules,certain words,certain alphabets which have to be where they have to be.Claude Shannon,mathematician extraordinaire and originator of A Mathematical Theory of Communication ,whose work has led to the explosion in the fields of networking and communications had a go with his seminal theory on linguistics as well.And the outcome was,I must digress into terms like information entropy here,that the more structured a message ;be it technical,financial,literary;the more it could be reduced,edited,compressed even or even partially lost.And yet it would retain its core message.This is the reason why voice calls,e-mails and text messages reach recipients intact even though there will be some packet level losses.
And this is also why you can pick up a torn newspaper article anywhere and you will be able to make sense of it with just half of what’s present.Or you can borrow a book from a library,come across a page,or two pages even that are missing,continue reading and still get the story.
The bigger question is why din’t our examiners and moderators understand our half written answers then ?;-) That’s for another day..and besides they have to be smart remember.Understanding presupposes and prerequires intelligence.